PlayStation Portal falls short: A limited vision for Sony’s handheld ambitions

Scour the internet, and you will find reviews of the PlayStation Portal (the sort of “PSP” remake, if you will), and things aren’t looking too bright.

Frankly, I don’t know what else we should have expected. Since Sony released details about the Portal, it’s become quite an anomaly in the resurging trend of handheld consoles.

The PlayStation Portal is a companion device for the PS5. It is used to stream your PS5 games that you already own in your system. It does not link to Sony’s cloud subscription model. There aren’t any other apps in it, so there is no YouTube and all. The DualSense-style controllers attached between the screen don’t come off.

The PlayStation Portal is just for remote play. You use it when lying in bed, in the bathroom, or when your family kicked you off the TV. You can’t even take the Portal to your work, school, or anywhere that uses a different Wi-Fi access than your PS5. You must have the same Wi-Fi for the Portal and the PS5 to remote play the games you have there. And you will need a good internet connection to even make it remotely playable. There are some reports that, despite having over 100Mbps, play experiences have been varied.

I have another question I can’t find the answer right away. Can you at least use the Portal as another controller? Or perhaps allow multiplayer between the PS5 and the Portal? It would be quite nice to have that kind of feature. If not, well, what’s another layer of shame atop everything else mentioned already?

It would have been great if the Portal would allow you to connect to Sony’s vast collection of cloud-based games. It would also be great if you could, somehow, at the very least, transfer game data between the PS5 and the Portal–perhaps via re-download–but that could be open to exploits in some way that Sony still hasn’t figured out or are currently future-proofing against.

As it stands, the Sony PlayStation Portal is a very niche device aimed at many (but not all) PlayStation fans. It’s not a Switch/Steam Deck killer. Sony doesn’t even seem to be trying to woo new PlayStation users into their ecosystem–why would they, though? As of July this year, Sony has sold over 40 million PS5 units and is just interested in catering for that market.

The Portal seems an anomaly in this growing space. Valve is putting out a new Steam Deck OLED, Lenovo has the Go, ASUS with the Ally, Logitech and Ayaneo are solid contenders as well, and the Nintendo Switch is still going strong with new games coming out through 2024 plus the heavily rumored next-gen Nintendo console to be announced next year. It seems so strange for Sony, a purveyor of innovation who has had handheld experience with the original PSP and the Vita, to hesitate to take another step forward.

As I see it, though, Sony is merely preparing the stage for the next five or so years as they gradually roll out the desired new features. It also gives Sony enough time to smoothen out any potential technical stuff that needs polishing. Who knows, maybe in the long run, the Portal will become the access point for backwards compatibility and hopefully, more portability as well.